Grateful Dead

Steppin' Out with the Grateful Dead

Previously unreleased live recordings from 7 shows in England in April of 1972.

The Grateful Dead’s 1972 tour of Europe has long been thought of one of the great jewels in the crown of the band’s three-decade performing career. The Dead had given a few isolated performances in England and France in previous years, but this lengthy and ambitious sojourn was their first full-fledged European tour, and they took the UK and the Continent by storm. The trip was immortalized on one of the Dead’s best-loved live albums, a three-LP set that had briefly carried the working title Steppin’ Out (to go with Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse’s famous cover image of a foot, emerging from under a rainbow and striding across the globe). But in the end, the band and their record label settled for the more plainly descriptive title Europe ’72.

Now, thirty years after the completion of that memorable excursion, Grateful Dead and Arista Records are proud to present a spectacular new four-CD collection of previously unreleased recordings from the 1972 Europe Tour. The title? What else? Steppin’ Out with the Grateful Dead.

The selections on Steppin’ Out are drawn exclusively from the Dead’s stops in England, which accounted for more than a third (and some of the very best) of the tour’s 22 shows. As you can tell from their enthusiastic response here, British audiences had been clamoring for a visit from the Dead for some time, and the band rewarded the UK fans’ patience with terrific performances, characterized by tight, purposeful playing and adventurous jamming. Heard in this set are fine renditions of some of the staples of the Dead’s early-70s repertoire, standbys from their earlier years and a few real rarities, including a couple of songs never released on any Grateful Dead album until now: a rollicking version of Huey “Piano” Smith’s “Rockin’ Pneumonia;” and a short but sweet take on the former Ellis McDaniels’ famous ode to himself, “Hey Bo Diddley.”

All of it — five hours of never-before-released live Dead — has been mixed and digitally mastered from the original multitrack master tapes, resulting in a recording of stunning clarity and presence. It’s the closest you can get to Europe in ’72 without a passport and a time machine.